It’s time to shake off 2020, and we have a bakers’ dozen projects to try that are good for your mind, your body, and your career. With our suggestions for tech, apps, and services to support you, you have an excellent chance of actually keeping these resolutions!
You don’t have to love New Year’s resolutions to take a moment to reset some part of your life on January first. There’s absolutely no reason you have to wait for any particular time to stop smoking or exercise more, but there is undeniably a psychological hook for committing to making some changes at New Year’s. After a particularly rough 2020, the start of 2021 feels like an excellent time to make some changes. Below are 13 suggestions for changes to make in 2021. They’re broken into three groups: Good for Your Mind, Good for Your Body, and Good for Your Career. Good for Your Mind Start Therapy. If you’d benefit from therapy (and who wouldn’t, honestly?), online sessions now make it easier than ever to sign up and try it. Online therapy tends to be low cost and sometimes covered by insurance. Many services let you use either a mobile device or your computer to connect. If you and your therapist don’t mesh, you can request a new one without having an uncomfortable confrontation. Some of the most well-known services are Doctor on Demand, Better Help, Talkspace, and MD Live. If you’re not ready for talk therapy quite yet, there’s also Moodpath, an app for tracking symptoms and feelings related to anxiety and depression. Meditate. How do you learn to meditate and keep it up as a practice? Meditation apps do both. Most of them offer guided meditations with instruction for beginners as well as a log of how many minutes you spend each day practicing. Some apps have silent meditation sessions that use simple timers to track your practice, as well as timed sessions that use nature soundscapes or white noise. A few apps worth checking out are Headspace, Meditation Studio, Ten Percent Happier, and Insight Timer. If you’re curious to try a device that gives you real-time feedback about how well you manage to calm your mind, take a look at Muse S. It’s a fascinating headband that reads your brainwaves while you meditate and uses audio cues to tell you how you’re doing. Journal. Keeping a diary is one of the best ways to preserve your memories, and a great New Year’s resolution. If you’re new to journaling and need help remembering to write each day or want prompts to guide you, there are some great apps and methods to try, some of which use real paper. For example, the Five Minute Journal ($24.95) is a popular paper journal that gives you daily writing prompts focused on positivity. There’s an app version, too for Android and Apple mobile devices. Another app is Day One (for Android, Apple mobile devices, and macOS), which is great for busy people. It lets you write freeform if you want or fill out a template when you need guidance. If you’ve read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, you might like Morning Pages, the app (the app is not affiliated with Cameron). Morning Pages is a journaling technique popular among creative types. It involves writing longhand for three full pages about anything at all on your mind. You can write tasks you need to do or vent about an argument with a family member. The purpose is to clear the clutter from your mind in one giant brain dump. The app version encourages you to dictate 500 words per day instead. Learn a Language. Another way to stimulate the mind is by learning or practicing a different language. With so many excellent language learning apps on the market these days, there’s hardly an excuse not to put in a few minutes a day. Duolingo is easily the best free app on the market for beginners and intermediate level learners alike. Be sure to explore the Stories feature in Duolingo for select languages, as well as the Duolingo podcast for Spanish, French, and English. Rosetta Stone is also a top pick, and it’s better if you want to sit and really focus on learning for 30-60 minutes per day, whereas Duolingo is great for short bursts of learning. If you’ve tried Rosetta Stone and you don’t connect with the style of teaching, try Fluenz instead. For intermediate to advanced students, check out Yabla (for learning through videos) and Rype, a service that helps you find tutors who teach sessions via video call. Sign Language, because it’s not an orally spoken language, needs to be taught differently.
